THE SECOND PAGE OF INC NEWS

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Pentagon-sponsored engineers have developed a system to shield unmanned aerial vehicles from cyber-attacks. It sounds the alert if a drone starts doing something that it is not supposed to do. Called System-Aware Secure Sentinel, the new system detects “illogical behavior” compared to how the aircraft normally operates.

“Detections can serve to initiate automated recovery actions and alert operators of the attack,” said Barry Horowitz, a systems and information engineer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, in a statement. Apparently, the system is meant to prevent embarrassing situations like the loss of a US spy drone in December 2011 to Iran. A CIA RQ-170 Sentinel drone was brought down after what the Iranians claimed to have been a hacker attack as it was flying in the country’s airspace.

The King of Thailand has ordered three Russian Sukhoi Superjet airliners for his royal fleet, the TASS news agency reported Friday citing Moscow's trade representative in Thailand, Oleg Maslennikov. The planes will be fitted out with luxury furnishing, Maslennikov said, without specifying the value of the contract.

The Thai King, 87-year-old Bhumibol Adulyadej, also known as Rama IX, is one of the richest monarchs in the world with wealth of over $30 billion, according to Forbes. The Superjet 100, built by Sukhoi Civil Aircraft, is Russia's effort to break back into the global civil aviation market after the collapse of its Soviet era industry. The plane has struggled to gain market share after setbacks including a disaster in 2012, when a promotional flight crashed into a mountainside in Indonesia killing all 45 people on board. Sales of the plane have gradually picked up, but Russia's state-owned Aeroflot remains the biggest single buyer with 30 orders.

Internet users in Russia and Turkey have been subjected to the greatest increase in web censorship over the past year, according to the latest Freedom on the Net survey. The survey, published Thursday by U.S.-based watchdog Freedom House, ranked 65 countries against a 100-point scale — with higher scores equalling a greater degree of Internet censorship.

Russia and Turkey each gained 6 points this year, the greatest negative trend recorded globally by Freedom House. Russia now ranks alongside Kazakhstan and Myanmar in 48th-50th place on the list, with 60-points out of the 100-point scale. Iceland and Estonia top the rankings for Internet freedom on six and eight points, respectively. The scale also brackets countries into three groups according to their level of censorship: "free," "partly free" and "not free."

In 1999, 20-year-old Tatyana Gavrilova was convicted of murder by the Russian courts. She spent the next 16 years in various institutions. On Sept. 9 this year she was released from the IK-2 women's prison in Mordovia and went straight to Moscow, taking with her a documented account of her treatment at the hands of prison authorities.

Gavrilova described her ordeal to MediaZona, the alternative online news agency established by Pussy Riot members Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Her account cannot be independently verified, but her description has struck a chord with many who have endured the harshness of the Russian penal system — including Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova themselves.